


Sacred in the Moment

by editingatwork



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Secret Relationship, the ever-looming homophobia of sports culture (implied)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 04:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14887664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/editingatwork/pseuds/editingatwork
Summary: Kent means it as a joke. Swoops doesn't.





	Sacred in the Moment

“I wanna kiss you everywhere,” Swoops murmurs, his lips tickling Kent’s jaw as he speaks.

“Everywhere?” Kent asks, only half-listening. They’ve been making out on his couch for twenty minutes and Swoops has both hands on Kent’s ass. Higher brain functions have been out the window for a while.

“Mm,  _everywhere.”_ Swoops punctuates this with a gentle bite.

And because Kent can’t pass up any opportunity to be a dick, he says, “Even Omaha, Nebraska?”

Swoops pulls his head up. “What.”

“Salt Lake City, Utah?” Kent continues, making his eyes wide as though scandalized. “Steak N Shake?”

“Stop.”

“ _Blockbuster_?”

Swoops groans and pinches his ass through his jeans. It barely hurts but Kent yelps anyway. “I was being romantic, you dickweed.”

“Sorry. It was too easy.” Kent knows he’s grinning too much for a believable apology.

“You’re such a pain,” Swoops grumbles fondly, and kisses him.

**Columbus, OH**

Losing is never fun. Losing in Columbus isn’t as awful as, say, losing in Pittsburgh, but it still sucks. The Aces are subdued the next morning as they haul their luggage out of the hotel, onto the airport shuttle, and onto the plane. Most of them find their usual seats and settle in for a nap, a movie, or a game of cards. Swoops’ normal seat isn’t next to Kent, it’s a few up ahead, so Kent is surprised when Swoops slips into the spot beside him.

“I’m not gonna be good company,” Kent warns.

“That’s fine, I’m not staying. Just wanted to give you something.”

“Oh?” Kent’s eyes still feel sticky with sleep and his heart is heavy from the shutout. He doesn’t realize what Swoops is doing until he feels the light pressure of lips against his temple.

“Everywhere,” Swoops says, giving Kent a gentle smile, and then he gets up and heads down the aisle.

Kent doesn’t figure out what Swoops meant by that until their plane is touching down on Ottawa tarmac. When he does, he blushes so hard his cheeks hurt.

_Oh. Everywhere._

**BB &T Center, Miami, Florida**

“Your tie’s crooked, c’mere.”

Kent looks down at himself, trying to see what Swoops is talking about.

“Just c’mere, will you?” Swoops is waving him away from the door to the locker room, which is already full of their teammates pulling off their game day suits and getting ready for warmups.

Kent rolls his eyes and goes over. “I’m taking it off in like, a minute.”

“Aren’t you the captain? Set an example.” Swoops messes with Kent’s collar and makes a few (minor) adjustments to the angle of Kent’s tie. “There.”

“You did literally nothing—” Kent begins to protest, but shuts up when Swoops reels him in by his tie and kisses him. The pressure is light, barely there, and gone in less than a second. After all, they’re alone in the hall but  _anyone_  could walk by.

Swoops drops Kent’s tie and winks. “Everywhere. Even outside the locker room.” Then he grins. “You’re blushing really hard.”

“You surprised me,” Kent sputters.

“Better stay on your toes, then.” Swoops pats his shoulder and heads into the locker room alone.

Kent stands outside and fans his face for a couple minutes before he feels like he can go in without being chirpped to death.

**The Blind Badger, Anaheim, California**

Kent quickly figures out that there’s no logic to the locations where Swoops will choose to kiss him. Sometimes it’s by city, sometimes by arena, sometimes it’s just random. Kent also finds out that he’s not allowed to play. He sneaks into Swoops’ hotel room one night in a desperate attempt to end the week-long dry spell they’ve been forced to have, and when he tries to say, “Everywhere, even your hotel room in Dallas,” Swoops just shakes his head and says, “Doesn’t work like that, Parse.”

So it’s Swoops’ thing,  _just_ his. Kent doesn’t mind. It’s embarrassing as hell, because he cannot stop himself from blushing like a fool every time it happens, but he doesn’t mind.

He’s starting to look forward to it.

The Aces go to Anaheim and win handily, 5-2, and then go out to celebrate. They’ve got their choice of bars, and end up in a place that one of the guys found on Yelp, called “The Blind Badger.”

“This place is classy as fuck,” Carl announces when they get in.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Swoops drawls, although Kent is looking around and he can’t say that Carl’s wrong. The bartenders are wearing ties and serving flaming martinis. Most people here are wearing at  _least_  business casual attire.

Their group gets a table and orders their first and second rounds. The bar’s atmosphere keeps them from getting too rowdy, but it’s impossible to smother the full force of their volume. Fortunately, the bar is crowded enough that the worst of their noise is drowned out.

Three rounds and a burger later, Kent hauls himself out of his seat while calling, “I’m going to the bathroom, nobody drink my beer.”

He’s no sooner through the door labeled “Gentlemen” than Swoops is right there with him.

“Swoops, what—Oh no, dude, we’re basically in  _public_ —”

Swoops kisses him anyway. Hot, wet, and  _filthy._ Kent almost chokes on the amount of tongue in his mouth. His back bumps the door and he yelps, which becomes a low, needy whine when Swoops pushes a thigh right  _there_.

It’s over before Kent can even think to retaliate. 

Swoops steps back, smirking, and licks his lips before wiping them with the back of his hand. Then he gestures to Kent’s crotch and says, “You’ve got...”

Kent doesn’t need to look, he can feel his own dick getting fat in his pants. “Who’s fault is that?!”

“Not mine. I was never here. I never kissed you in the men’s bathroom at a bar.”

“You absolutely did, and now I’m horny as fuck. You better make this up to me later. You  _owe_  me.”

“I will.” Swoops is still smiling, the dick. “You gonna let me out?”

Kent moves away from the door, but not without getting in a hard smack on Swoops’ ass as he goes by.

**The Marriott, Montreal, Canada**

They’re both stupid, is the problem.

They join a group of guys watching a movie in Kelly’s room. They don’t sit together—Kent shoves his way onto the bed and Swoops takes up a spot at the foot of an armchair. But they’re in the same room, still together, and even having five other teammates in the room with them heckling their way through Fifth Element, they can catch each others’ eyes and share a smile and that sense of,  _Oh, hello_.

After Corbin Dallas has met LeeLoo (but before the Diva sings her solo) Swoops gets up and says, “I’m hitting the vending machine.”

There are scattered requests for Doritos and Snickers and Diet Pepsi, and half a dozen other things that aren’t on any of their meal plans. Kent grabs his wallet and says, “I’ll go with you.”

The halls are empty, just miles of off-white walls and eye-smarting geometric red carpet. A dimly-lit alcove hides the ice dispenser and two vending machines, one for drinks and one for snacks. It’s not exactly romantic. But as Kent is feeding dollars in and eyeing his chocolate options, Swoops takes his arm and says softly, “Hey.”

Kent looks up, and Swoops kisses him. It’s soft and lingering, the kind of kiss that makes Kent feel peeled open. Like Swoops is seeing Kent raw and he  _likes_  what he sees. It makes Kent feel wanted, cherished.

"With Hershey's as my witness," Swoops murmurs.

Kent chokes on a laugh, which makes Swoops giggle, and it's so goddamn cute that Kent has to pull him back in. They kiss through their smiles, each of their hands finding places to latch on: a hip, a shoulder, a back pocket. Kent loves that Swoops makes him feel like this, like Kent is something to be sought out and savored. He wants to say "fuck the movie" and drag Swoops back to his room.

Then someone says, way too close, “Are you guys—oh, my god.”

They break apart. It’s Scraps.

Kent can feel the blood draining out of his own face. He feels numb.

Scraps is still standing there, slack-jawed, his eyes wider than Kent ever thought they could go. 

“S-scraps,” Swoops says. “Buddy—”

“You guys were kissing."

Kent grapples with words. “I, uh. No we weren't.” 

“You were kissing in the hallway,” Scraps says, like he’s talking about an alien encounter in a cornfield. “Like,  _kissing_. Are you guys, you know, together? Or is it just—what’s it, blowing off steam? ‘Cause I never did it but I heard a lot of guys in Juniors—”

“How ‘bout you fuck off ‘cause it’s none of your business?” Swoops cuts in, his glare cold.

Kent puts a hand on Swoops’ arm and gives him a look meant to convey  _Back the hell off, man._  To Scraps, he says, “Can we talk about this later? Please? And... maybe don’t tell the guys? Or like, anyone?”

Still giving Swoops a befuddled frown, Scraps nods. “Sure.” He holds up a dollar bill. “Can I buy some pretzels?”

So they move aside to let Scraps buy his pretzels. Kent pats him on the shoulder and says, “Don’t tell the guys?”, to which Scraps repeats, “Sure,” and heads back to the room.

Kent heaves a sigh of relief. “Well, fuck.” Then he gives Swoops a gentle-but-not-that-gentle punch to the arm.

“Ow! The hell?”

Kent punches numbers into the vending machine and squats to pick his M&Ms out of the slot. “You didn’t have to be such a dick.”

“Oh yeah, sorry for being scared outta my mind. How long do you think this is gonna stay quiet? It’s Scraps, for crying out loud! This is the guy who spent a whole day pondering out loud whether a ton of bricks weighed more than a ton of feathers and still didn’t come up with an answer!”

“Wow, and you are  _still_  being a dick.”

Swoops waves both hands angrily, hard enough to nearly send his handful of snacks flying. “How are you so calm?!”

Kent sighs. “Because it’s Scraps. He’s a good guy, he won’t rat us out. Christ, Swoops, you know that. You wanna tell me why you’re freaking out so badly?”

Swoops grinds his teeth for a second, then says, “No.”

“No, you don’t know, or no, you don’t wanna tell me?”

“No, I don’t want to tell you. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to  _me_.”

“So?”

Kent gapes. “Fine, then.” He turns on his heel and heads back to the room, alone.

Later, when Swoops comes back and hands out goodies, Kent doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t acknowledge Swoops for the rest of the night, and when he wakes up the next morning still mad, he doesn’t talk to Swoops on the bus or the plane, either.

**~~Saint Paul, Minnesota~~ **

Eventually the sting of the spat wears off. It has to; if they don’t let it dissipate, it could fuck with team dynamics, and nothing is worth that. Kent is a captain first and a lover second. When they’re on the road, facing down December and an agonizingly slow but steady drop down the Western Conference rankings, he has to be.

They don’t talk about what happened in front of the vending machine in the Marriott in Montreal, though. It chafes at Kent, the memory of dismissal in that single, “So?” But Scraps doesn’t tell anyone and that seems to satisfy Swoops, and if there’s no active disagreeing going on, Kent has to assume it’s all fine.

"Are you guys fighting?" Scraps asks Kent at a team dinner.  "You and Jeff?" Everyone around them is stuffing their faces and drinking, because they’d just lost that afternoon on account of a  _truly_  embarrassing couple of empty-net goals.The bar has three blaring TVs and most of them are half drunk. None of them are listening.

"No.”

Scraps looks surprised. “Really? You guys are always together, and now you’re...not.” He glances down the table, where Swoops is laughing loudly at something Tads has just said and stuffing cheese sticks in his mouth. Then he leans in close and says something so quiet that Kent can’t make it out.

“Bud, I can’t hear you.”

The volume comes up a notch. “I said, did you guys break up?”

Kent’s immediate response is to shake his head and exclaim, “No!” but what’s horrifying is that his first thought is,  _Wait, did we?_

Their game hasn’t suffered, at least. Kent wouldn’t place the blame of tonight’s loss on him and Swoops not clicking on the ice.

But he’s acutely aware that Swoops hasn’t kissed him since Montreal, and that... scares him, actually. He hadn’t let himself think about it but he is now and when he looks at Swoops sitting a few feet (it feels like miles) away, drinking and eating and not seeking Kent out with his eyes the way he usually would...

It’s a black hole in Kent’s chest.

Shit.

**Providence River, Providence, Rhode Island**

“Can we talk?” Kent asks—pleads, really, the morning of the game. Half the team is still asleep upstairs in their rooms, the other half eating breakfast and fully distracted by coffee and their phones. Kent is not a morning person, but Swoops is. Kent had set his alarm for this god-awful hour so he’d have a shot at getting Swoops alone.

Swoops has been wearing an expression like he was expecting this since he spotted Kent coming out of the elevator. But he just sighs, says, “Yeah, sure,” and puts his empty plate aside. “Where?”

“Let’s take a walk,” Kent suggests.

They grab cinnamon rolls and cups of coffee for the road and leave the hotel. Nobody expects the Aces to go anywhere this early, so the front lobby and entrance are clear. Kent steers them in the direction of the Providence River. Swoops might know where they’re going, he might not. Still, he follows without question or complaint.

With the sun barely in the sky and the area not residential, they have the sidewalks mostly to themselves. Kent asks, without preamble, “Did we break up?”

Swoops nearly spits out his coffee. “What? No!” His eyes are wide. “Wait, are you saying you want—”

“No! No.”

“Okay.” Swoops takes a careful breath. “Okay. Good. I don’t want to.”

“Me neither.”

Kent leads them left at an intersection, and it’s only a few more minutes before the river comes into view. There’s a bike path following it, lined with white railing and skeletal trees bereft of their leaves. It’s November but unseasonably warm—or at least what passes for “warm” in Rhode Island at this time of year. Kent’s sweatshirt and his coffee are keeping him from feeling the brunt of the morning chill. The sun is rising over the city, breaking it into blocky shadows and streaks of light.

They walk, finishing their cinnamon rolls and draining their coffees and then dumping the remains in a public trashcan. The silence drags on.

Swoops breaks it. “I know what I said, I know how it came off, and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry I wasn’t sorry earlier. I’m just... I don’t know. I was pissed off.”

Kent hates to ask, but he does. “At me?”

There’s a small, awful pause preceding Swoops’ response. “No.”

“Scraps, then? ‘Cause it’s not his fault he saw us—”

“I’m not pissed at Scraps. Or maybe ‘pissed’ isn’t the right word, I don’t know. I just—him showing up reminded me, is all. That it’s not safe to kiss you everywhere.” Swoops blows out a frustrated breath and rubs his eyes. “I  _would,_ you know? I’d kiss you in front of other people. I’d kiss you anywhere, in front of everyone, if I...could.” His eyes are going glassy and he quickly wipes the wetness away.

“Holy shit, are you—?” Kent says, but doesn’t wait for a response before pulling Swoops into a tight hug.  

Swoops’ returning grip is like a bearhug. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Kent holds him close as long as he dares. Then he pulls back and meets Swoops’ gaze. “So, you like me, don’t you.”

“Of course I like you.”

“You really,  _really_  like me.”

“I’m fucking crazy about you,” Swoops huffs. “Okay?” He’d be more convincingly exasperated if his face wasn’t blotchy and his eyes weren’t still damp.

“I’m fucking crazy about you, too,” Kent admits, even though it feels like diving in front of a Zdeno Chara slapshot. Being around Swoops has the side-effect of making Kent brave to the point of stupidity. “So don’t stop kissing me all over North America, okay? You said everywhere. I want everywhere.”

Swoops might cry again, from the look of him. Kent can’t believe he’s been best friends with this guy for half a decade and never known what a soft heart Swoops has. “I’ll do my best,” Swoops says.

Kent wants so badly to take his hand. “Come on,” he says instead. “Let’s find a really thick bunch of trees and kiss behind them.”

“That’s basically in public,” Swoops protests, but Kent can’t help noticing that he follows along as soon as Kent starts walking again. “I’m not helping you do something that stupid.”

“Well, fine. Where do  _you_  wanna kiss me?”

Swoops puts an arm over Kent’s shoulders—casual enough to be ‘just friends’ but close enough for Kent to feel his warmth—and smiles. “I’ll see what comes to me.”

**Author's Note:**

> am i dead? no. am i tired? yes.  
> [tumblr is here](http://punmasterkentparson.tumblr.com/).


End file.
